Items tagged with 3D

Samsung, Microsoft, and Sony have all jumped on the VR bandwagon. So where is Nintendo? Nintendo of America CEO Reggie Fils-Aime is a little reluctant to jump into the VR market. He stated that the company will not adopt VR until it can be readily available for the mass market. Fils-Aime thinks that the VR technology is too expensive and the audience for the device is too limited at this point in time. He would also like to see VR mass market applications and applications that consumers can invest a lot of time in. At the moment, most VR experiences are “short snacks of time”. Essentially, Nintendo...Read more...

The early focus on emerging virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality technologies is on gaming, but there are many other potential applications for this stuff. One of them is simple remote communication, which Microsoft demonstrated through holoportation, a neat new technology that allows people in remote locations to interact with one another as if they're in the same room. It's video conferencing on steroids. "Holoportation is a new type of 3D capture technology that allows high-quality 3D models of people to be reconstructed, compressed and transmitted anywhere in the world in real...Read more...

There are few platforms in the emulation realm that are as well taken care of as the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Over the years, there have been a countless number of NES emulators that have come out, with some targeting different platforms or different goals -- some aim for accuracy, while some treat performance as the most important feature. Some simply try to go above and beyond by offering people a better-looking or easier-to-use UI. All of that is good, but none of the releases seem to do anything really interesting - until now, that is. Enter 3DNES. With this coming...Read more...

Intel is very much an active participant in the immersive 3D category with its RealSense technology, though it has bigger and more ambitious plans. To put those plans in motion, Intel today announced that it's acquiring Replay Technologies, an Israeli startup that specializes in sports replay technologies that allows viewers to re-watch highlights in 360 degrees. If you watched the NBA All-Star Weekend festivities last month, then you would have caught a glimpse of the company's proprietary "free dimensional" or "freeD" video technology. It was mostly utilized during the slam dunk contest. During...Read more...

Google's making a push for 360-degree videos on its YouTube service with GoPro as a key partner. You might recall that GoPro was present at Google I/O where it unveiled a contraption of GoPro Hero cameras arranged in a circle. That contraption is now called Odyssey and it's being made available in limited quantity. Odyssey is an array of 16 Hero4 black cameras, each fully loaded with custom firmware. It offers features such as genlock camera synchronization and multi-camera control, and has "extended battery life," GoPro says. It's designed to work with Google's 3D, 360-degree virtual reality program...Read more...

Virtual reality has captured the hearts and minds of consumers and developers alike with systems like Oculus Rift and Samsung's Gear VR, but what if you want to capture your own VR content? Nokia has you covered. The company announced a funky looking camera with an equally funky name -- OZO. While it looks like one of the orbs that shot energy bolts at a blindfolded Luke Skywalker during his Jedi training, it's actually a purpose-built camera designed for professional content creators. OZO came out of the minds of Nokia's R&D facilities in Tampere, Finland. It's a work in progress, though it's...Read more...

At Google's I/O conference, held late this week, Qualcomm announced that the next-generation Project Tango platform is going to sport its Snapdragon 810 processor, which packs in the very capable Adreno 430 GPU. As we've covered before, Project Tango is Google's upcoming smartphone and tablet platform that revolves around using the device for 3D purposes. With it, you could capture and turn the environment around you into a 3D model, something that multiple cameras and infrared sensors would help with. With its Snapdragon 810 processor, Qualcomm says that it will allow Project Tango to deliver...Read more...

Intel gathered a number of software developer and hardware manufacturing partners together this week in New York to showcase the latest technologies and innovations that Intel's RealSense 3D camera technology can enable. From new interactive gaming experiences to collaboration, 3D mapping and gesture control, the technology holds promise that could someday reinvent how we interact with PCs. The camera technology itself integrates a depth sensor and a full color 1080p HD camera together with standard technologies like dual array mics, but with an SDK, processing engine and 3rd party software that...Read more...

HP announced two new updates to its ZBook Mobile Workstation line at CES today. The PC maker’s new ZBook 14 G2 and ZBook 15u G2 are both workstation ultrabooks that support 3D graphics and undergo HP’s heavy testing process for enterprise devices. The HP ZBook 14 G2 runs on Core i5 or i7 processors with 16GB of memory, as well as AMD FirePro 3D graphics. Storage space is even more important for workstations than consumer systems, so the ZBook includes 1.25TB, through a combination of hard drives and SSDs. Business laptops have been getting classier in recent years, and the ZBook 14 G2 sticks to...Read more...

There hasn't been a whole lot going on in the 3D display camp as of late, and that's probably because the industry found itself distracted by two other emerging technologies -- virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Rift, and 4K Ultra HD displays. Toshiba didn't get those memos, however, and is still hard at work on a glasses-free 3D viewing technology that it plans to incorporate into a 15-inch 4K LCD panel. As Toshiba explains it, this is a new technology that uses a low-crosstalk, high-definition LCD GRIN lens, or "gradient-index lens." In a GRIN lens, the refractive-index distribution is...Read more...

Your PlayStation 4 console supports 3D Blu-ray playback, though before that functionality becomes available, you need to install the latest firmware update, version 1.75. Sony has begun rolling out the update to PS4 users, giving them bragging rights over Xbox One owners, at least for the time being (Microsoft will roll out 3D Blu-ray support to the Xbox One in August). There are a few other goodies included in the update, though mostly minor from here on out. They include improved sound quality during 1.5x playback with Blu-ray and DVD videos, the relocation of system messages to the top-left...Read more...

Here's some great news for creative types who are into 3D rendering -- Pixar is getting ready to offer up a completely free version of its RenderMan 3D software for non-commercial use. This will be a fully functional release with no watermarking, time restrictions, or gimped features. Pixar intends for the software to be used by students, institutions, researchers, developers, and all-around personal use. In addition, Pixar slashed the price of its RenderMan software for commercial use to $495 per license. Pixar developed its RenderMan 3D software more than 25 years ago and then used it for movies...Read more...

Perhaps it was inevitable, but Google’s Project Tango team has expanded its device experimentation beyond smartphones into tablets. The tablet will, like the Project Tango smartphone, provide real-time 3D mapping overlays of real environments using cameras and sensors. According to the Wall Street Journal’s sources, Google is planning to pump out some 4,000 tablets from its ATAP division to seed to developers. As we said when covering the Project Tango smartphone, the key to this technology is very much whatever devs can dream up. Project Tango smartphone The WSJ stated that the Project...Read more...

The latest off-the-wall endeavor from Google is called “Project Tango”, and it’s a smartphone equipped with technology that can 3D map any environment you find yourself in--in real time. A product of Google’s ATAP (Advanced Technology And Projects) group, Project Tango takes a quarter million measurements every second to create a living, breathing 3D model of wherever you are. If you’re not immediately visualizing killer uses for this technology, you’re not alone--but that’s because the technology itself will require the creativity of software developers...Read more...